Word: arendt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Arriving in America has been a "crystallization" of many years of study, writing, and correspondence for Donoghue. He will visit many friends with whom he has been corresponding, such as the poet Richard Eberhart and the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt...
...resettle German Jews in other countries. Eichmann was genuinely proud of his work; he thought he was doing the Jews a favor. He admired Zionists as "idealists" and said that he, too, wanted to give the Jews a home of their own. He was sincerely shaken, Arendt believes, when he learned of the Führer's "Final Solution"-to kill the Jews. "I now lost everything," he moaned, "all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out." But he quickly made the adjustment. He became as efficient at transporting Jews...
...this is perceptive, if arguable. What is startling is that Arendt goes on to suggest that most Germans were no better than Eichmann, and some were considerably worse. They could have resisted the orders of Hitler, she says, but none of them did. Arendt claims (in the face of documented evidence to the contrary - by Allen Dulles and Hans Rothfels, among others) that a German underground did not develop until the war went against Germany. She fails to mention a well-organized plot to overthrow Hitler in 1938, which was sabotaged by Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich...
...Question of Courage. Arendt has a romantic notion that it was simple to stand up to Hitler, and that those who did usually made Hitler back down. As an example, she cites the heroic refusal of the Danes to deliver up Jews. Confronted with Danish obstinacy, she writes, "Nazi toughness melted like butter." But the fact is that the Danes were able to protect the Jews because they had much more autonomy than most of the Nazi satellite nations; and they had been granted this autonomy by Hitler because they had not opposed the Nazi invasion...
Drawing heavily upon Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews for her information, Arendt tries to make the case that Jews were saved in those countries where the citizenry was gallant enough to object. The truth is less dramatic and more circumstantial. In countries like Denmark and Italy, which were only superficially controlled by the Nazis, the Jews were relatively safe. In countries run by the Nazis - Poland, Holland, Greece - the Jews were invariably massacred. Sad as it may be to record, the courage and the dedication of the local Resistance fighters made no difference...